Genealogy and some experiences of gamification in Italian politics, 2013-2019

The category of gamification – intended as the use and implementation of game design elements in extra-ludic contexts (Deterding et al., 2011) – has gained extensive popularity in recent years. Moving, therefore, from the original environment and setting to the debate in policy making (Vanolo, 2018) and public policies. The pervasive logic of game mechanics and game rewards (associated with social rewards) has increasingly showing its founding ambivalence and contradictory attitude. Discipline and surveillance instrument – as it happens in “Big Tech” enterprises – and neoliberal ideological practice (Tulloch and Randell-Moon, 2018) as well as, at the same time, the idea of gaming as manner of nudging individuals to behave and react in a more civic way. During the 2010s, gamification was also adopted by the political marketing and campaigning of the American Democratic Party (“Hillary 2016”), British Labour Party (the online game “Corbyn Run”), and La France Insoumise (“Fiscal Combat”). And, already during that decade, forms of gamification can also be found in the communicative strategies of Italian leaders and parties. The proposed paper aims to analyze three stages and moments of gamification in Italian politics: 1. The online platform “peragendamonti.it” (2012). The support and participatory site linked to Mario Monti’s candidacy which contained a real game (with badges and hierarchies) inspired by Foursquare, where the score increased in relation to shared content and ideas. 2. The Five Star Movement’s “pioneering” Piattaforma Rousseau (2016). The platform – pillar of the Five Star’s rhetoric of disintermediation (Biancalana, 2022) and direct democracy (Vittori, 2020) – provided a system of merits through which militants chose their candidates on the basis of skills and preferences. And the same methodology, for a certain period of time, was also used internally with the voting of the proposals. 3. The repeated editions of the game “Vinci Salvini” (until 2019), a real competition for militants, in which it was enough to like the leaders’ posts and messages or images on social networks to win selfies, phone calls and confidential personal meetings, finalized to collect data and preferences and to create political engagement. This paper – also through qualitative interviews with political consultants involved in the implementation of quoted – finally seeks to answer to these research questions: ▪️ Is there a peculiar “Italian way” to gamification in politics? ▪️ Is gamification a political resource especially for neopopulist leaders and organizations (or, at large, for postmodern paradigm of leadership)? ▪️ Does gamification foster citizens’ participation and mobilization and/or political militancy?